Shortly after returning to Melikhovo, Chekhov received news that his Uncle Mitrofan, who had been ailing for some time, was now seriously ill and was asking Chekhov to come in his capacity as a physician. His affection for this uncle was strong, and so was his desire for a reason to leave Melikhovo again. He set out for Taganrog on August 24.
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While Goltsev was delivering a public lecture on the literary characteristics of Chekhov,4 the honored author was complaining to his brother Alexander that he found it difficult to combine a desire to live with a desire to write. Nothing was more irksome or less poetic, he felt, than the relentless pressure to write in the face of need; it took away
Chekhov refers here to an actual experience while attending a spiritualist's stance as a youth. He then made use of it in his story, A Terrible Night (1884).
Goltsev's lecture was published in the May 1894 issue of Russian Thought.
the joy of life and plunged one into apathy. Nor would he now stoop, like the bourgeois writer Barantsevich, to taking the easy way out by writing for the unsophisticated public that ate salt beef and horseradish sauce with relish and did not care for artichokes and asparagus. Such bourgeois writers were false, he declared to Suvorin, because they could not help being false. "They are vulgar writers perfected. These vulgarians sin together with their public, and the bourgeoisie are hypocritical with them and flatter their narrow virtue." (August 15, 1894.)
This critical frame of mind is reflected in what little Chekhov did write over the summer of 1894. Once> answer to the charge of critics that he was a pessimist, he told Bunin that The Studentan optimistic tale which he had written at Yalta, was his favorite among all his stories. And his brother Ivan, when asked, replied that Chekhov regarded this brief tale as his most finished piece. Though the annals of literature have demonstrated repeatedly that authors are rarely the best judges of their own works, in this instance it is easy to understand Chekhov's preference. For in The Student he has achieved to perfection that exquisite harmony of form and content, of mood and substance which Tolstoy must have had in mind when he described Chekhov as the Russian Pushkin in prose. On the eve of Good Friday, a poor seminary student tells two simple people he encounters by a campfire the Biblical story of how Christ was bound and taken before the high priest, and of how Peter, fearful of his own life, denied Him thrice. The artless simplicity of the student's narration moves his hearers to tears. And as he goes on his way his soul is filled with joy, for he suddenly realizes that the past is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another. He had seen both ends of the chain. The truth and beauty which guided life there by the campfire and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day. And the "inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of an unknown, mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him rapturous, marvelous, and full of lofty meaning."
In The Teacher of Literature,6 an entirely different note is struck,
The Student was first published in Russian News (April 16, 1894) under the title At Evening. The title was changed in the collection Stories and Tales, 1894, and it remained The Student in subsequent collections.
The first chapter, entitled The Philistines, was initially published in New Times (November 28, 1889), and the second chapter, with the title The Teacher of Literature, appeared in Russian News (July 10, 1894). Both chapters appeared together as one tale, The Teacher of Literature, in the collection Stories and Tales, 1894.
one of social satire. The life of the well-to-do provincial family, the Shelestovs, is depicted as a constant round of horseback parties through the city park, visits to their farm, stupid conversations at home, childish games, dances and lavish meals. And in the school where the hero Nikitin teaches, a low level of learning is patronized. A master does not dare to make the usual speech over the grave of a friend and colleague, because the headmaster had not liked the deceased. Young Nikitin, who has worked his way up from poverty to become a respected teacher, is at first flattered by the attention of the Shelestovs, who have two marriageable daughters. But the initial happiness he finds in marriage to the youngest is soon poisoned by the idleness and banality of his wife and her family. The story ends with Nikitin making an entry in his diary which foretells his approaching rebellion — and suggests perhaps Chekhov's own distaste for this way of life: "Where am I, my God? Vulgarity surrounds me everywhere. Boring, insignificant people, dishes of sour cream, pitchers of milk, cockroaches, stupid women. There is nothing more terrible, more offensive, more dull than vulgarity. To escape from here, to run away today, or else I'll go mad!"
More of this spirit of social satire, with perhaps a deeper personal note, rings out in At a Country House, which appeared in Russian News shortly after Chekhov left for Taganrog that August. The boringly loquacious Rashevich subjects his guest, Meier — an examining magistrate, and prospective suitor of one of his host's daughters — to a tiresome monologue on his favorite theme: the good things of life come from the well-bom of society. All the finest qualities of mankind, he argues, and all the gifts of science and art belong exclusively to the aristocracy. All the great Russian writers, he declares — Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, and Tolstoy — were not the offspring of clerks. When Meier objects that Goncharov came from a merchant family, Rashevich counters by doubting Goncharov's artistic abilities. "In fact," he thunders, "as soon as your dirty-faced fellow gets above himself, he begins to sicken, to waste away, to lose his mind, and to degenerate; and you'll not find anywhere as many neurasthenics, mental cripples, consumptives, and starvelings of every kind as among these fine birds." The patient Meier can take no more, and to the dismay of both his host and his daughters, he explains that he himself comes from the working class. Meier leaves the house in a delightful scene of embarrassed small talk, which Chekhov, born of peasant stock, mercifully contrives in order to save the face of the blueblood Rashevich.
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On August 31 the Taganrog Herald announced in its columns: "At present the famous writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, a native of Taganrog, is visiting here. He has been summoned in his capacity as a physician to his seriously ill relative, M. E. Chekhov, an elder of St. Mikhail's Church. From here the talented writer will proceed to the Crimea." Displeased by this local tribute, Chekhov called at the editorial office and scolded them for printing it. And he told one of the reporters that it would be more to the point if the press would frequently remind the people of how neglected their city was, that it lacked waterpipes and a decent public library.